Mobile Phone a.k.a cell phone a.k.a handheld phone. It is difficult to find a person without a cellphone, whatever economic condition he/she is in. Most of you might be using a cellphone for years now. But have you ever wondered to know more about the manufacturer of your phone? Ever felt that you need to know just a bit more about the brand? Who are they? Where are they from? How did they enter mobile phone business? Well, this series of articles are going to do just that. I am going to focus on the history of these major mobile phone manufacturers and this is the first article of the series.

This company is slowly but certainly heading towards centennial anniversary (though it is more than a decade away). We have seen many mobile phone manufacturers reel during recession or when the landscape shift happens. But this company withstood ‘The Great Depression’, ‘World war II’, many economic recessions, countless landscape shifts, cut-throat competition. Just when the world felt that the company is going down, they strike back with a revolutionary product. They gave the world top-class management/process guidelines(six-sigma). This is Motorola and they changed the way world communicated.

One thing that I really love about Hyderabad and Vijayawada is the cinema experience. Most of the theaters adopted 70mm format and the screens are absolutely huge. Add to that powerful DTS/Dolby systems and huge two level auditorium (first class and balcony). When I came to Bangalore in 2003 for a training, I went to Urvashi Theater to watch ‘Matrix Reloaded’. I was dumbfounded at the size of the theater and the spine chilling sound stage.

One major aspect that I love about ‘Free software’ is the freedom that it gives an user to switch to a different OS/app/tool/whatever. And this is exactly what happened this month for me. I have been extremely happy with Ubuntu 10.10. In fact, it was so good that I abandoned Windows 7 to move to Ubuntu. You can read more about the switch to Linux here. Then came two pathetic releases (11.04 and 11.10) which destroyed the very advantage that Ubuntu had (ease of use, lag-free UI). I personally felt that this was just my feeling but then I came across these stats at DistroWatch.com:

and then this statement on Linux Mint blog:

As other distributions adopted new desktops such as Unity and Gnome 3, many users felt alienated and consequently migrated to Linux Mint. We recorded a 40% increase in a single month and we’re now quickly catching up with Ubuntu for the number #1 spot within the Linux desktop market.

I tried Linux Mint 11 few years ago and felt that it was way faster than Ubuntu and thought of giving it a real try later as I was pretty happy with Ubuntu 10.10.

From this month, I will be giving ‘extreme VFM’ tag to three phones among the list. This tag means that the phone is better than anything else in that category and is better than few phones in next category. The list first:

Few years ago, iPhone was an experience. Those who owned an iPhone were treated like Gods and people wanted to touch it just once. When Apple launched iPhone in India, it used to cost an arm and a leg. There was nothing that could compete with iPhone.

Enter Android

What Google did to smartphone industry is what Microsoft did to PC industry. I hope I need not explain in detail. For less than half the price of an iPhone, you get Droids that does more than what an iPhone can do albeit the premium quality look. Go to the flagship Droids and they are either on-par or better than the iPhone, be it iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S. The top end Droids like Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc, HTC Incredible S, are better than the iPhone 4 while the devices like SGSII, Sensation XE, Motorola Razr, Galaxy Nexus are better than the iPhone 4S (all areas considered, especially in Indian markets).Once these top end droids hug Icecream Sandwich, they will become way way better than iPhone 4S.

Nokia and Microsoft. One makes truly innovative smartphones that run on a dying or DOA OS. The other made fresh and breathtaking UI which is underrated by many (including me till I tried it earlier this year) and to make it worse, OEMs have come up with average smartphones that doesn’t have anything unique about them.

Make or break

For Nokia, this certainly is a make or break situation. Their global smartphone marketshare is sinking so fast that we will soon see them listed among “others” in marketshare tables. A recent analysis shows that their share fell to 14% (from 30+%). With the announcement of Symbian’s outsourcing and de-prioritization, they now depend heavily on Windows Phone devices to be a runaway hit. Some might say that Nokia still sell lot many feature and low end devices. Yes, they do have healthy budget phone marketshare. But tht is good only on paper and does nothing to increase revenues. I think selling one flagship devices gives more profit than selling a dozen or two budget feature phones (that cost around 5k). Microsoft on the other hand has nothing much to loose. They have other products/markets and other OEM partners that they can concentrate on.